"Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client is an open source technology that allows you to build web applications that seamlessly and safely execute native compiled code inside the browser. Today, we've reached an important milestone in our efforts to make Native Client modules as portable and secure as JavaScript, by making available a first release of the revamped Native Client .[...]In the coming months we will be adding APIs for 3D graphics, local file storage, WebSockets, peer-to-peer networking, and more. We'll also be working on Dynamic Shared Objects (DSOs), a feature that will eventually allow us to provide Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability."

I'm looking forward to a NaCl version of Flash, Java, Adobe Reader, etc. - because not only will they be effectively sandboxed, and prevented from executing malicious code, but they will be compiled for a "cross platform" environment effectively allowing them to run on any OS with a NaCl port.

On the other hand, it is my understanding that they must be recompiled for each processor target they will run on - but there are generally fewer of those than there are OS platforms these days

I'm looking forward to a NaCl version of Flash, Java, Adobe Reader, etc. - because not only will they be effectively sandboxed, and prevented from executing malicious code, but they will be compiled for a "cross platform" environment effectively allowing them to run on any OS with a NaCl port.

That does sound promising.

On the other hand, it is my understanding that they must be recompiled for each processor target they will run on - but there are generally fewer of those than there are OS platforms these days

Yeah, with the near-death of PPC I would say x86/x64 and ARM are pretty much the only major hardware platforms left. Speaking of ARM, this may be something the hardware hacking crowd will want to see come to fruition, as many of the microprocessor-based development boards out there use the ARM platform.

ARM isn't one target. It's many. Different versions of the instruction set, with and without different extensions. That's why open source is so great, this doesn't matter. x86 need the backwards compatibility because it's a closed platform, things can't be recompiled. ARM has never had the need to be static like this, not since it left Acorn behind. Each device can have the ARM as it requires and code compiled for that. In open source world, this doesn't matter either, a repository is just compiled against the target for that device/family.

I still don't get what the big deal is about online apps vs a repository. Locally installed apps, updated from the "main frame", isn't this what locally installable cloud apps are? Non locally installed cloud apps are useless because you won't always have a connection, let alone a good one. So actually, I'm quite happy as is.....